Construction and Real Estate

The latest twist in a rezoning drama that has been going on for 18 months has left developer CN Hotels of Greensboro with no room for an inn. The outcome of a contested rezoning usually satisfies either the protestors on one side or the landowner and developer on the other. But the case of a vacant 0.72-acre lot at 6026 Park South Drive has been anything but usual.

More than one year, two developers and a rezoning battle later, construction is finally underway on new Class A apartments in the Kenton Place mixed-use development on West Catawba Avenue.
Kenton Place Partners LLC of Charleston, S.C., last Tuesday pulled nearly $3.5 million in Mecklenburg County building permits to start construction on a three-building, 210-unit complex, which is expected to build out at a cost of more than $25 million, according to Lance Youngquist, one of three partners behind the project.

How do you build a house in 30 hours? Help. Lots of help, like 150 around-the-clock volunteers, a handful of professional supervisors and a dozen paid AmeriCorps interns. If there was a third "H" in Habitat for Humanity, Frank Spencer said, it would stand for help, on which the organization depends for its existence.

Retail follows rooftops. It’s the old real estate adage explaining how commercial development responds to residential development. So the recent growth in homebuilding and homebuying in the Charlotte market – which is expected to continue into 2014 – will likely be accompanied by increased commercial development over the next two years, even if developers are still cautious about the overall economy.

Greensboro-based Lomax Properties, a commercial real estate firm, is in the midst of developing Morehead West apartments, a 212-unit community on Millerton Avenue, just off West Morehead Street, hoping that corridor is on the rebound, rather than the relapse.

Whether it’s Class A apartments, value-added properties or workforce housing, the Queen City’s apartment market is expected to remain strong in the foreseeable future.
Five apartment industry leaders said so on a panel Tuesday morning at Bisnow’s third annual Multifamily Summit held in a ballroom at the Omni Hotel in uptown Charlotte.

Thanks to a building permit worth $755,872, a property owner on the Peninsula soon will be able to boast, “I can see Denver from my house.” That property owner, Ramzi Abul-Hajj of Huntersville, on Tuesday pulled the most valuable Mecklenburg County single-family home permit of the year to build a 10,000-plus square-foot waterfront home on the very westernmost tip of the county’s extension into Lake Norman, according to county records.

1200 South Boulevard, a 331-unit project at Carson and South boulevards, has been off the drawing board for more than a year, waiting to join the list of apartment projects coming to South End. The site is soon to change, with apartment construction set to begin within the next month, according to Capstone Building Corp., the Birmingham, Ala.-based general contractor that’s working on the project.

John Church planned to tear down the 110,000-square-foot, three-level former textile mill in Belmont and put in new retail and residential space. In mid-August, as a wrecking ball dug into the brick, an architectural gem began to emerge: the original Chronicle Mill - Belmont's first textile plant - built in 1902.